


We Are Full of Stories to be Told

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Gen, High School, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 16:16:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3535898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-series, high school era vignettes.</p>
<p>
  <i>I'll see you in the future when we're older...</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are Full of Stories to be Told

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mammothluv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mammothluv/gifts).



She twists her hair up into a hasty knot and gives her reflection a perfunctory nod in the water-stained mirror when the blonde curls settle artfully into her go-to school style. She lists elements in her head as she cleans her teeth, recites their atomic weights and closes her eyes to picture their positions on the periodic table. 

_Sn, tin, position 50  
Above Pb, lead, position 82_

The pop quiz is no guarantee but Izzie wants to be ready, _needs_ to be ready…

_To the left of Sb, antimony, to the right of In, indium._

 

Just in case.

 

She calls to her mother through the open bathroom door, then spits a frothy mouthful of toothpaste into the base of the sink before adding a somewhat garbled reminder that she’s heading to a friend’s house after school to study.

There’s a note on the refrigerator announcing the same plans. And another stuck via post-it to the inside panel of the front door. She knows from experience it probably won’t be enough. Three weeks ago, a similar Friday night spent choreographing a new cheer and stealing wine coolers from her best friend’s step-mother had ended with hysteria and a sour-faced police officer with his hat wedged authoritatively beneath one arm.

She’d giggled and rolled her eyes, looked up at him through her lashes and watched him visibly deflate as she’d shaken out her hair and stomped the determined snow from her winter boots before pushing past him and towards her flailing mother.

_I told you,_ she’d said to her mom, lightly, softly, turning back to the officer then, _I’m _sure_ I told her…_. The scrap of paper with her plans scrawled in purple sharpie had still been attached to the refrigerator with the chipped maple leaf magnet that used to say _I love Vancouver_. She hadn’t bothered pointing this out.

He’d nodded at her claim, disbelief locked in the brief tightening of his lips. Solemn and serious again, he’d warned her about the dangers of wandering around alone after dark and then inched his way back out of their trailer.

 

Three weeks ago, the note on the refrigerator had been the truth.

Tonight though, tonight maybe not so much…

 

 

In the absence of an acceptable alternative, he smokes a stolen cigarette for breakfast. Snaps the match in half with the first strike and then burns his fingertip and thumb on the second as a quick wind whittles away at the flaming stub. He inhales and holds his breath, waits for the tar and the nicotine to fill his belly.

Alex knows enough about biology to understand that this is not how it works.

He also knows enough about _life_ to realise you’ve got to use what you’re dealt. Get through the next day, the next hour, the next three and a half minutes.

There’s a basketball game tonight after class, an away match against a school that beats them on the regular. Thirty eight points last time they met, despite his own freakish run of three pointers in the third quarter and the start of the fourth. But his knee popped out at training ten days ago and the coach won’t even let him run drills at the moment, let alone take the court.

He’s supposed to go anyway. To sit there in his sweatpants and school hoodie and pretend like he cares about the result. 

But he’s no bench warmer and if he can’t play, he’s not going. No way.

Not an option.

 

At the corner, he watches his little brother turn left towards the gates of the elementary school; leans back against the rough brickwork of the convenience store and pretends, just for a moment, that he doesn’t know the blonde haired kid with the bright blue school bag slung over one shoulder. That there isn’t a widening hole in the bottom of his left shoe. That his father hadn’t been unconscious on the sofa when he’d slammed the front door shut this morning.

And that the warm rush through his bones when his knee had collapsed beneath him a week and a half ago hadn’t been relief. That it had nothing at all to do with the increasing panic he feels at leaving his mother home alone on a Friday night. A spider web of growing terror that something isn’t right. 

Something big.

Something so much more than just a side effect of being eight and a half months pregnant.

 

 

The house is empty. She knows this before her eyes even open. The quality of the silence is familiar, a weight as heavy as the blanket she drags obstinately back over her head.

She could ditch, she thinks, entertains the notion for a full five minutes before burying her face in her pillow and screaming. 

When Meredith finally drags herself to the bathroom, she needs a double take to recognise herself. 

_Oh, right…_

Pink hair. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She pulls it back into a rough ponytail and grins falsely at her reflection. Crosses her eyes and pokes out her tongue.

_Urgh._

 

There’s coffee but no milk. And definitely no cereal. She stirs two teaspoons of sugar into the swirling black and catches sight of her homework spread haphazardly across the dining table. She’d packed it up the night before, she remembers doing so, remembers stacking the textbooks and arranging the completed pages one on top of the other. 

They’re not stacked now. And one of the diagrams she’d painstakingly etched sometime after 11pm is covered in red arrows, labels crossed out and replaced, her spelling corrected.

 

The house may be empty now, but her mother has clearly been home at some point. 

 

She slurps at her coffee noisily and quickly re-does the anatomical representation of the human heart that was last night’s assignment. Uses half her mother’s corrections, removes the random _r_ she’d added to _vena cava_ , and pretends like she’s grateful.

That it’s proof her mother knows she still exists.

At least on some level…

 

She locks the door as she leaves; reties the fluoro orange lace that’s worked its way loose in her left Chuck Taylor, pulls the collar of her coat up and over her chin, and smears Chapstick on her lips with the back of one nail as she trudges resolutely forward towards another day.

 

 

A violin bag is already strapped over one shoulder as she pulls a boot on with her left hand and uses the right to shovel a crumbling toast crust towards her mouth. 

Multi-tasks like a _boss_.

 

School is virtually empty when she arrives. Her old social studies teacher passes her on the front steps and offers up a casual hello, like maybe she hadn’t been his worst nightmare come to life for close to eight months last year.

Cristina pretends she doesn’t see him at first, notes that his biceps are nicely on display beneath the stretch of his pale blue shirt instead and decides she’s not really into _awkward_ this early in the morning. Then, calculated, when he’s turning away and she’s several steps too far to have to stop and chat, she bounces back an “oh, hi” and keeps on walking.

Because, _yeah_. 

_Oh, hi…_

 

The music room is _actually_ empty when she arrives, just as she’d planned. She dumps her violin case unceremoniously on a chair inside the door, makes a beeline for the old seven-piece drum kit in the corner, and pauses for a beat to bow her head, to take a deep breath in before sliding her weight onto the low stool and spinning the drumsticks between her fingertips twice.

She drags her long hair from its sensible up-do and shakes it loose vigorously in preparation…

 

Carter Beauford’s _Tripping Billies_ solo never sounded so good.

 

She plays the violin because it’s what her dad would have wanted. And she _likes_ the violin, for the most part.

She smashes the drums because it’s raw. Because it’s aggression and power and sweat and pain and all the things she covets the very most in this world. 

Her eyes half shut, she loses herself in the burn of lactic acid and the blur of her own tangled curls and wonders, for a split-minute, how hard she’d have to play to skip this part. To skip high school and college and all these endless years of being a ridiculous teenager. 

How hard she’d have to play to skip it all and fast-forward herself into a future so clearly defined she can almost reach out and touch it.

 

 

There’s a fight for the bathroom. There is always a fight for the bathroom. It wouldn’t be a normal day if there wasn’t a fight for _something_.

George loses. 

See above with one slight amendment; it wouldn’t be a normal day if _George specifically_ didn’t lose a fight for something.

Although, is it still losing if you don’t even try? If you throw your metaphorical hands up in the metaphorical air before the shouting and the banging reach their full, inevitable crescendo, and retreat back into your bedroom to double check your calculus homework one last time?

Probably.

 

_Definitely…_

 

His calculus homework is fine. His calculus homework is always fine. In a world where almost nothing else does, numbers make sense to him, they have structure and order and purpose and you can use them to bring calm to any kind of chaos.

Except, perhaps, to his brothers.

He flops backwards onto his bed, cushioned by pillows behind him and numbers folded against his chest, he can let everything still for a precious five seconds as his cat circles lazy figure of eights around his ankles. Her contented meow, the only sound he allows to register.

 

Sometimes he dreams about running away. Of joining the circus or the Army or the Peace Corps, of taking off on a road-trip to find his birth parents because surely, _surely_ he’s adopted, right?

But then his mom will bake vegetarian lasagna for dinner just for him, even though she knows his brothers will whine about the lack of ground beef, and she’ll wink at him conspiratorially as she pulls it from the oven, and he’ll grin back and wrap his arms around her briefly while no one else is looking. 

And he’ll remember then, _again_ , that he can imagine being no-where else.

 

No _one_ else.


End file.
